


Vision Test

by TigerLilyNoh



Series: The Uncomfortable Adventures of Sam in Law School [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anxiety, Bisexual Sam Winchester, Disability, Disabled Sam Winchester, Episode: s02e09 Croatoan, Exams, Law Student Sam, M/M, Sam Winchester's Visions, Sam-Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 22:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5392916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerLilyNoh/pseuds/TigerLilyNoh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm a Supernatural fic writer, who is currently going to law school in the Bay Area, so I figured I'd write some vignettes of Sam in law school.</p><p>Collection theme: Sam chose law school over hunting, but it wasn't exactly how he'd imagined it.</p><p>This ficlet: Sam takes his first final exam of the semester, but there's an unexpected development.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vision Test

Sam's timer sounded and he stood up for a quick stretch.  It was only 8am, but he'd moved his mindfulness meditation exercise to just after his morning gym routine.  Generally, he liked to keep to a pretty rigid schedule- it was good for his anxiety, but with today being the first day of final exams he needed a little extra mental focus.  

He was more nervous than usual for several reasons.  It was just Sam's luck that of the fourteen day exam window, all five of his finals fell within the first seven.  Also, this was his first time taking advantage of the school's disability accommodations.  

He was determined that this year would be better than the last.  Last fall he'd received a B average in his classes, which he largely blamed on his three day hospital stay during the post semester study period.  Through an incredible amount of hard work he'd managed to bring his grades up to B+/A- in spring, thereby saving his scholarship.  But he wanted to prove to himself & everyone else that he wasn't teetering on the edge of failure.  He wanted to excel in some part of his life.

Despite the frenzy of studying, he did take a few short breaks for his own mental health.  One afternoon he attended a small holiday & tree decorating party in the law school's library.  Parties weren't normally his scene, but he needed to get out of his room and it seemed like as good an excuse as any- better in fact, it was catered.  

Even though the school was Catholic, they made significant efforts to be pluralistic.  The school prided itself on being one of the most diverse law schools in the country and reflected that in all their major activities short of Christmas or Easter mass.  Sam supposed he was another statistic that they cherished even if he was a white male.  At the end of his first year, he'd completed the annual anonymous diversity survey, in which he'd confided his agnosticism & bisexuality.  For this year's survey he'd have to add being disabled to that list.

The party itself was kind of nice.  He recognized a handful for professors & students, though he wasn't close enough to any of them to do anything more than make idle small talk.  The inevitable question of holiday/winter break plans came up repeatedly.  For the most part Sam was able to deflect further questions by flatly saying that he was going to just stay on campus.  Thankfully, no one pressed him for information on his family life, or even his personal life beyond classes.  With finals just around the corner everyone had at least some common ground.  It was a small, but meaningful comfort in the middle of the chaos and he cherished the memory while packing up his laptop bag before heading out.

* * *

It took him fifteen minutes to locate the disabled testing facility, but the room hadn't even been unlocked yet.  He stood around the small waiting area and exchanged curious glances with the nearby students.  After a moment he realized that they were all sizing each other up, trying to figure out who might be a fellow disabled student.  There were eight other students, three of which were in classes with him.  Only one student was visibly disabled.

Sam leaned against the wall and took a few deep breaths.  His pulse had risen while he was climbing the stairs, but the pre-exam adrenaline was keeping it up.  He should've taken the elevator even if it was only two floors.  One of the academic advisors had told him to never take the stairs before an exam or performance- now he understood why.  Next time he'd try it out.

"Is this your first time getting accommodations?"  A female student asked him.  She was seated in a chair about five feet down the wall from him.  

"How'd you know?"  Sam confessed.

"You tried the door.  The proctors are always late."  She smiled up at him.  He returned a slightly nervous smile, then glanced around reflexively looking for a possible proctor.

"I didn't expect so many people."  He offered as small talk.

"Do you have social anxiety or something?"  Her brow furrowed a bit, but her face softened sympathetically.

"No, not really.  I just didn't know what to expect I guess."

Another student came up the stairwell, hugged another who was waiting and began chatting about their upcoming exams.  They were clearly friends, but didn’t seem to be classmates- at least for this semester.  One of them was a 1L and the other was taking electives, which weren’t offered until 2L.  It made sense that any common subset of people might nurture friendship, he supposed common struggles with adversity nurtured it even more so.

"I'm new to this whole disability thing."  Sam elaborated.

"Injury?"  

"No."

"Ah..."  She cringed and nodded.  "Want to talk about it?"

"It seems like talking is all I can do about it."  He immediately felt a bit guilty for the gloomy turn in their conversation.  This random woman didn’t need to be dragged into his drama.

"Well, I hear that."  She raised her bottle of water in a toasting gesture.

"What?"  

"Welcome to being disabled.  They take away your membership card if you ever get fixed."

"Disabled services didn't give me a card."  His rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly worried that he was missing some sort of necessary identification.

"I was joking.  You really are new to this?  I'm Laura."  She offered her hand to him.  He accepted the handshake, which was infinitely more sincere than any interaction he’d had at the holiday party.  “Sorry you have to be here."

“I’m Sam.  And thanks.”  He replied.  After a few seconds of silence curiosity got the better of him.  “Do you mind if I ask..."

"Back problems."  Laura volunteered.  "I had scoliosis growing up.  It basically crushed my left lung- I had a hunchback and everything.  So they fused my spine.  It's almost all one solid piece of bone & steel."

Now that she mentioned it, her back was perfectly straight.  She wasn't using her chair's back at all.  Instead she was just sitting perpendicular to the ground.  Abstractly he could understand that she’d had a bunch of smaller bones somehow glued or bolted together, but he didn’t have the medical knowledge to understand what that meant in a practical sense.  Brady’d probably know something about it.

"How does that affect you taking tests?"  He hastily added.  "I didn't mean that to be insulting or to suggest-"

"I'm not offended.  It's not obvious."  She pointed to her lower back.  "I have three vertebrae that aren't fused.  Between the vertebrae are these little jelly things called discs- they are the squishy cushion that lets your spine bend & twist.  When you fuse joints all that pressure they would've carried gets put somewhere else.  My three discs are carried all the load from my spine and it's super hard to exercise that area because I can't move almost all of my core.  Long story short, if I sit for fifteen minutes I start getting back pain, which is unbearable after thirty minutes.  I have to get up & stretch for a few minutes a couple times an hour, which adds up over a three hour exam.  So I get extra time and room to move around if I need it."

Sam was trying to imagine having that sort of disability.  The idea of riding in a car for hours on end like he used to sounded like agony.  It was weird to see her, someone with such a persistent form of chronic pain and to not be able to see some indication of it.  There was always so much going on below the surface- sometimes he forgot that, in spite of his own history.

"I get fast onset migraines."  Sam offered, leveling the field between them.  "They happen pretty often, sometimes more than once a day.  If I get one it can wipe me out for an hour or two."

"Are you getting extra time also?"

"Yeah."

"You'll be fine."  She reassured him.

* * *

When the proctor arrived and unlocked the door, she double checked each student against her list.  Most of the other students were left to select desks in the room, which was no bigger than a large office.  Laura & Sam each had a glorified closet assigned to them.  Laura may have expected the space to move around, but he hadn't realized he'd been given the additional perk.  It was explained that the accommodations coordinator thought he might be less likely to suffer a migraine if he was in a quieter environment, away from the click of neighboring keyboards.

Part of him wanted to turn down the private room, but it was tempting to take any advantage he could get.  He settled in at the desk, set up his laptop, and waited for the proctor to begin the instructions.  To his surprise, the entire process was less formal than in the normal classroom.  On every previous exam the proctors would read a script to dozens of terrified students, at least three of which would be frantically trying to flag down the lone tech support worker in the room.  Here, there was more of a conversational feeling.  The proctor checked one on one to make sure everyone was good to go and understood the instructions.  It was such a minor touch, but being personally asked if he was ready quelled some of his nerves.

About an hour into the exam he was overwhelmingly grateful for the privacy.  The familiar pain spread from his temples to behind his eyes.  After a few seconds his visions became saturated, then the hallucinations started.  He saw a blond guy in his late teens or early twenties was tied to a chair in some sort of medical office.  The guy was pleading that something wasn't in him.  Other people were standing around, unsure of whether he was telling the truth.  Finally, a man said that they couldn't take that chance and shot the blond guy in the head.  The shooter was Dean.

Sam looked at the clock on his laptop and had a small panic attack when he realized somehow he'd lost fifteen minutes.  When he started typing he noticed the four drops of blood on his keyboard.  It took him a moment to determine that his nose was bleeding considerably.  He took the single tissue he had in his pocket and tried to clean up his keyboard for fear that the blood could somehow cause liquid damage if it snuck below the keys.  Then he pressed the bloody tissue to his nose before peeking into the main room.

"Excuse me, do you have any tissues?"  Sam asked the proctor.

"Oh god, are you okay?"  She whispered back to him, obviously concerned about whether she should go get him some medical assistance.

"Don't worry about it, it's normal."  He lied.  The last thing he needed was to miss anymore exam time.

After finishing the exam, Sam went to the nearest bathroom to wash his face.  The pain & bleeding had passed, but he felt lightheaded.  He sat down on the floor in the hallway outside the bathroom.  It was getting worse and he didn't understand why.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and began scrolling through his contacts list.  His neurologist would want to know about the nosebleed & losing time.  While thumbing through the names he spotted Dean's entry.  For almost a minute he stared at the listing before selecting it.  The phone rang for a long while before going to voicemail- no surprise there.  This must've been the thirtieth time his call had gone unanswered, it was routine.  But then he did something that surprised himself, he called Bobby.

"Yeah?"  Bobby answered the phone warily.

"Hey Bobby, it's Sam, Sam C- Winchester."  Sam greeted his old part-time caregiver.  It'd been at least three or four years since they'd spoken.  Not that they were fighting, Sam just didn't want to get dragged back into hunting and he'd always had a hard time saying no to Bobby.

"Sam!  It's good to hear from you."  His voice lost some of its lightheartedness.  “How big’s the bad?”

Bobby was a smart guy, Sam was sure the old hunter had realized that there was a reason for the call.  All the more motivation to call more frequently.  Then his covert emergencies could be hidden amongst the mundane.

"I was just wondering... Do you know if Dean & my dad are okay?"  He managed to avoid asking if they were alive.  That would've been an even bigger red flag.

"Did something happen?”  Bobby sounded confused.  “You probably know more than me.  I haven't heard anything from them in about two months."

Bobby didn't know- about the fight, probably about Jessica, about basically everything.  Sam wanted to tell him, to confide all the loss & despair.  But if he started he wasn't sure he could stop.  He'd be crying on the floor of the student union, bearing his soul to someone who hadn’t signed on for that.  And what if Bobby wanted to help?  That seemed worse than neglect somehow, the idea of Bobby intervening in some way.  

He was out… He was a civilian… yet he couldn’t quite convince himself that he was safe.  But hunters weren’t the kind of people that could keep him safe.  His problems weren’t that sort- not anymore and never again.

"It’s nothing.  I just had a bad feeling all of a sudden and Dean didn't pick up."  Sam assured.  He only had 15 hours to get ready for his next exam- everything else could wait.  Maybe he'd explain it to Bobby another time, after he'd thought about the situation in some depth. "I'm sure everything's fine."


End file.
